ow, no one will object to women's devoting themselves to works of
religion and charity; but this devotion should come before marriage.
If they have assumed the position of wifehood, it is a monstrous thing
to hold themselves degraded by its consequences, or to consider the
care of children a waste of their own life. The world can do without
learned women, but it cannot do without good wives and mothers; and
when married women prefer to be social ornaments and intellectual
amateurs, they may be called philanthropists and scholars, but they
are nevertheless moral failures, and bad mothers.

Society has put maternity out of fashion also, and considering the
average society woman, it is perhaps just as well. No children are
more forlorn and more to be pitied than the waifs of the woman whose
life is given up to what she calls "pleasure." Humbler-born babies
are nursed at their mother's breast and cradled in her loving arms.
She teaches them to walk and to read. In all their pain she soothes
them; in all their joys she has a part; in all their wrongs "mother"
is an ever-present help and comforter. The child of the fashionable
woman is too often committed at once to the care of some stranger, who
for a few dollars a month is expected to perform the mother's duty for
her. If it does not suck the vitiated, probably diseased, milk of some
peasant, it has the bottle and india-rubber mouthpiece, when the woman
in charge chooses to give it. But she is often in a temper, or sleepy,
or the milk is not prepared, or she is in the midst of a comfortable
gossip, or she is dressing or feeding herself, and it is not to be
expected she will put any sixteen-dollar-a month baby before her own
comfort or pleasure.

The child cannot complain of hunger, it can only cry, and very likely
may be struck for crying. What these neglected little ones suffer from
thirst is a matter painful to inquire into. The nurse, accustomed to
drink her tea and her beer at all hours, does not, herself patronize
cold water, and she never imagines the child needs it. Many a baby,
after being tortured for hours with a feverish, consuming thirst,
passes into the doctor's hands before the trouble is recognized. But
if the child's own mother had been nursing it she would not have been
long in finding out the cause of its impatient, urgent fretfulness.

Let any tender-hearted woman go into the parks and watch one of these
unhappy children in the care of its nurse. The ho